Plans to Hire First Quarter

If you plan to hire in the first quarter, start your preparations now.

With the unemployment rate at an “unnatural low”, finding the right people to hire has become excruciatingly more difficult than when the labor market was more “normal” and we were all just trying to identify the best from the rest.

Of course, it’s a permanent part of our jobs now as leaders to create an environment in which people are motivated to excel and live our cultures, but short cuts in selection can be dreadful. It’s hard to believe how much preparation needs to go into every hire we make.

If you’re planning on any hiring in the first quarter of 2018, I urge you to consider this. New Year’s Eve brings with it hopes, dreams, and even commitments for a new start on so many fronts – some health related, some relationship-based, but often career oriented. For ages we’ve known the first week or two in January has people looking for new opportunities who just a week earlier weren’t even open to conversations; these same people are looking before they have their resumes together!

Simply expressing the plans for growth and willingness to have some of the preliminary conversations before the need is urgent is more than just wise, it’s critical.

You know we profess gathering the stakeholders of the job together to have them define what success looks like (create the scorecard) and then identify the ideal person to do that work in your culture (create the Avatar). As the holidays creep up on us, and pressure to push for goals before the end of the year becomes intense, getting those stakeholders all together for 5 hours is tough. There’s nothing wrong with defining the job and the Avatar now for use early in January.